Resources from Crossing Borders Through Literature, Poetry and Personal Stories

Resources from Crossing Borders Through Literature, Poetry and Personal Stories

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, the Kennedy Library and John F. Kennedy National Historic Site presented Crossing Borders - Through Literature, Poetry and Personal Stories, a conference for teachers of grades 3-8 and school librarians. More than 100 people gathered at the Library on April 7, 2011 for discussions with award-winning authors and Peace Corps educators on how to deepen students’ understanding of peoples and cultures around the world.

Marjorie Anctil and Lynette Bouchie of Coverdell World Wise Schools guided participants through the Peace Corps’ extensive resources for educators, available online at www.peacecorps.gov/wws. Sasha Lauterbach, librarian at Cambridge Friends School, and Marion Reynolds, instructor of children’s literature at Tufts University, presented high quality books set in different countries as well as criteria for selecting materials which accurately reflect a particular culture.

Junko Yokota, professor of education and director of the Center for Teaching through Children’s Books at National-Louis University, served as moderator for a riveting panel discussion with authors Alma Flor Ada, Naomi Shihab Nye, Linda Sue Park and James Rumford. The authors drew on personal experience, examples from their works, and responses from readers as they offered a range of perspectives on what it means to “cross borders.”

Books as Passports, an annotated bibliography created for the conference, can be accessed here.

Listen to excerpts from the authors' panel:

Alma Flor Ada

Books include: Dancing Home; Under the Royal Palms; Where the Flame Trees Bloom; The Gold Coin; Gathering the Sun; and A Magical Encounter: Latino Children's Literature in the Classroom.

"As I think about borders... I think that many times there’s a confusion between another word beginning with the same sound, and that is 'barriers'. And I think that it’s essential that borders should not be barriers."

James Rumford

Books include: Rain School; Silent Music: A Story of Baghdad; The Cloudmakers; Traveling Man: The Journey of Ibn Battuta, 1325-1354;and Seeker of Knowledge: The Man Who Deciphered Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

"...I think that when you start with the basic human emotion of respect that it is this human emotion that you must always go back to before you begin anything, before you even begin to think about the differences in culture."